THE next day broke calm and fair. The robins sang remorselessly in
the apple-tree, and were answered by bobolink, oriole, and a whole
tribe of ignorant little bits of feathered, happiness that danced
among the leaves. Golden and glorious unclosed those purple eyelids of
the East, and regally came up the sun; and the treacherous sea broke
into ten thousand smiles, laughing and dancing with every ripple, as
unconsciously as if no form dear to human hearts had gone down beneath
it. Oh! treacherous, deceiving beauty of outward things! beauty,
wherein throbs not one answering nerve to human pain!
Mary rose early and was about her morning work. Her education was that
of the soldier, who must know himself no more, whom no personal pain
must swerve from the slightest minutiæ of duty. So she was there, at
her usual hour, dressed with the same cool neatness, her brown hair
parted in satin bands, and only the colourless cheek and lip differing
from the Mary of yesterday.
How strange this external habit of living! One thinks how to stick in a
pin, and how to tie a string,—one busies one’s self with folding robes,
and putting away napkins, the day after some stroke that has cut the
inner life in two, with the heart’s blood dropping quietly at every
step.
Yet it is better so! Happy those whom stern principle or long habit
or hard necessity calls from the darkened room, the languid trance
of pain, in which the wearied heart longs to indulge, and gives this
trite prose of common life, at which our weak and wearied appetites so
revolt!
Mary never thought of such a thing as self-indulgence;—this daughter of
the Puritans had her seed within her. Aërial in her delicacy, as the
blue-eyed flax-flower with which they sowed their fields, she had yet
its strong fibre, which no stroke of the flail could break; bruising
and hackling only made it fitter for uses of homely utility. Mary,
therefore, opened the kitchen-door at dawn, and, after standing one
moment to breathe the freshness, began spreading the cloth for an early
breakfast. Mrs. Scudder, the meanwhile, was kneading the bread that had
been set to rise over-night; and the oven was crackling and roaring
with a large-throated, honest garrulousness.
But, ever and anon, as the mother worked, she followed the motions of
her child anxiously.
‘Mary, my dear,’ she said, ‘the eggs are giving out; hadn’t you better
run to the barn and get a few?’
Most mothers are instinctive philosophers. No treatise on the laws of
nervous fluids could have taught Mrs. Scudder a better _rôle_ for this
morning, than her tender gravity, and her constant expedients to break
and ripple, by changing employments, that deep, deadly under-current of
thoughts which she feared might undermine her child’s life.
Mary went into the barn, stopped a moment, and took out a handful of
corn to throw to her hens, who had a habit of running towards her and
cocking an expectant eye to her little hand whenever she appeared.
All came at once flying towards her,—speckled, white, and gleamy with
hues between of tawny orange-gold,—the cocks, magnificent with the
blade-like waving of their tails,—and, as they chattered and cackled
and pressed and crowded about her, pecking the corn even where it
lodged in the edge of her little shoes, she said, ‘Poor things, I
am glad they enjoy it!’—and even this one little act of love to the
ignorant fellowship below her carried away some of the choking pain
which seemed all the while suffocating her heart. Then, climbing into
the hay, she sought the nest and filled her little basket with eggs,
warm, translucent, pinky-white in their freshness. She felt, for a
moment, the customary animation in surveying her new treasures; but
suddenly, like a vision rising before her, came a remembrance of once
when she and James were children together and had been seeking eggs
just there. He flashed before her eyes, the bright boy with the long
black lashes, the dimpled cheeks, the merry eyes, just as he stood and
threw the hay over her when they tumbled and laughed together,—and she
sat down with a sick faintness, and then turned and walked wearily in.